Skip to main content

anomalous monism

This thesis by Donald Davidson states that mental events are .... surprise!.... anomalous. They are such b/c they can't be accounted for in terms of the laws of nature that apply to non-living things. They are something more than non-mental events, even though they are purely physical.

If we take this as a description of perception (and set aside questions about the human soul, with its knowledge of universal truths), then Davidson seems to be onto something. And the "monism" here might be taken as "non-dualism," i.e., as not precluding an Aristotelian hylomorphism.

Comments

Unknown said…
What does the last word mean?
5:20 PM
Unknown said…
Also, Walker Percy in his philosophical essays says the same thing about language.
5:25 PM
Leo White said…
Hi Tim,
Good to know that at lest one other human being finds my meanderings worth looking into. Now to your question: hylomorphism is two Greek words patched together. 'Hyle' means matter or stuff, as in the stuff out of which something is made. 'Morphe' means form as in shape. A common Thomistic expression (and Thomists are pretty much Aristotelians) is that soul is the form of the body. In other words, body and soul aren't two interactive entities. Rather, they are two principals of one entity. One "informs" the other. An analogy: just as a visible object always has one form or another, so too matter never exists apart from form. This analogy breaks down a bit because the shape of a thing seems to be less real than that which has the shape, whereas the soul is not less real than the body. I am interested not so much in the matter/form relation as it pertains to the body/soul as I am in the matter/form relation as it pertains to sensation, perception. These cognitive operations says Aquinas, have material and formal aspects. By cognitive operations I don't mean anything spiritual, immaterial, immortal or whatever. What I'm talking about pertains to awareness found in dogs and cats as well as humans. And I don't think dogs or cats have immortal souls.
9:03 AM
Leo White said…
Walker Percy speaks of hylomorphism?
9:03 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

P F Strawson's Freedom and Resentment: the argument laid out

Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson.  He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal.  My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this.  I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true.  Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist.  In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...
Post a Comment
Read more

response to friend who suggested that the self is a democracy of neural parts

This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level.  No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies.  None of them thinks about the whole as such.  And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist).  None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well?  And why not parts of these parts, et...
6 comments
Read more

Daniel Dennett, disqualifying qualia, softening up the hard problem, fullness of vacuity, dysfunctional functionalism

Around track 2 of disc 9 of Intuition Pumps , Dennett offers what I would call an argument from vacuity.  He argues that David Chalmers unwittingly plays a magic trick on himself and others by placing a set of issues under the one umbrella called the "hard problem of consciousness." None of these issues is really , in Dennett's opinion, a hard problem.  But in naming them thus, Chalmers (says Dennett) is like a magician who seems to be playing the same card trick over and over again, but is really playing several different ones.  In this analogy, expert magicians watch what they think is the same trick played over and over again.  They find it unusually difficult to determine which trick he is playing because they take these performances as iterations of the same trick when each is  in fact different from the one that came before.  Furthermore, each of the tricks that he plays is actually an easy one, so it is precisely because they are looki...
Post a Comment
Read more